We are very pleased to announce that a large number of our incoming students have won prestigious scholarships. Notably, two incoming MSc students have been offered full Clarendon Scholarships: Gilli Vidan (Social Studies, Harvard) and Olga Musayev (Ethics, Politics and Economics, Yale University), as well as two incoming DPhil students, Nicolas Friederici (Telecommunication, Information Studies and Media, Michigan State University) and Ulrike Rauer (Social Science of the Internet, OII).

The Clarendon Fund is a major graduate scholarship scheme at the University of Oxford, offering over 100 new scholarships every year to the best students worldwide, enabling the most distinguished scholars to study at the University of Oxford. They are highly competitive, with less than seven percent of applicants selected for the scholarship across all subject areas. To have four Clarendon-funded students entering our (small) department next year says a lot about the extremely high calibre of the applications we receive.

Allison Mishkin (Social Implications of Technology, University of Pennyslyvania) has been awarded the Oxford OII Google Scholarship. We are also very pleased that two of our own MSc students, Ulrike Rauer, who is returning to academic study after a year with McKinsey & Company, and Vyacheslav Polonski, who is just finishing up his MSc at the OII, have both been offered ESRC studentships to support their DPhil studies at the OII.

Finally, we have offered scholarships to Asha Fereydouni (Political Science, University of California) who has been offered the OII MSc Scholarship; and to current DPhil students Joshua Melville and Bruce Etling, who have been offered OII DPhil scholarships.

In the current difficult economic climate it can be hard for students to obtain funding to complete a graduate degree, so the support provided by scholarship funds such as these is of great importance. We are delighted that our incoming students have found such success, and would like to warmly congratulate them all.